THL Music Encyclopedia Overview

This space makes video and audio recordings of Tibetan music available and whenever possible provides transcripts and translations of those performances. Second, we provide here some organization of the recordings to make it easier to navigate through the world of Tibetan music. Third, we hope this will become a space that encourages others to contribute new recordings and join the discussion about Tibetan music.

In the THL A/V archive there are currently around 650 individual recordings pertaining to music. The majority are musical performances but some are interviews as well. We are currently creating a THL YouTube channel to provide organized access to the (sometimes chaotic) wealth of Tibetan music posted there.

Our most important technological goal is to encourage the practice of using external text transcript files for subtitles and translations of recordings. Storing transcript files separately from media files makes it possible to search collections of transcripts but it also lets the transcripts become living documents rather than a one-time best shot at capturing the lyrics and language of a song.

Most commercial Tibetan music videos are subtitled in Tibetan script to make them accessible to the widest possible Tibetan audience. In most cases, the subtitle text is encoded directly to video instead of being stored as a text caption track. We are developing exciting technologies, like transcript search and fragment playback, that he hope will lead to greater adoption of the use of text caption tracks encoded in unicode Tibetan.

To supplement the recordings, this space publishes discussions (scholarly and otherwise) of:

Tibetan musical genres

regional styles

music terminology

musical instruments.

We want to expand the Music Encyclopedia to include more stories about the lives of Tibetan musicians and performers. We're interested in exploring the many influences that shape a given performance. How are performers influenced by their musical traditions and how are those traditions adapted to meet the changing commercial music landscape. What factors are at play n defining Tibetan musical tastes? What are peoples' favorite songs and why?